Pratt Judith

The Swedish legal publisher Notisum AB has been on the Swedish market for online legal publishing since 1996. Our Internet-based law book at www.notisum.se is read by more than 50,000 persons per week and our customers range from municipalities and government institutions to Swedish multinationals.

Now we are heading for China, and I would like to share with you some practical experiences from this highly dynamic market and our challenges in trying to conquer it.

The case for a legal monitoring tool, codenamed “EnviTool”

In close co-operation with our customers, we had developed a set of specialized Internet based tools in Sweden for supporting the process of legal compliance and legal information sharing within big organizations. The key driver of these needs was the growing number of certificates according to the international environmental management standard ISO 14001:2004.

ISO 14001 is a worldwide industry standard to help companies to improve their environmental performance through the implementation of an environmental management system. There is much to say about management systems. Continuous improvement is the heart of the matter–it is all about doing the right things right. Establish a plan, do what you planned, check your results and then start all over by correcting your plans. Plan, Do, Check, Act.

According to the standard, you have to identify the relevant environmental legislation for your organization. You need access to those laws and regulations, and you have to keep an updated list. You should also make the information available to the people of your organization.

By providing an online legal register, monitored for changes, with a whole set of information sharing and workflow features, Notisum helps the certified companies to comply with the environmental legislation.

We developed this system step by step. When it came to going outside the borders of the Kingdom of Sweden, we changed the name from Rättsnätet+Miljö to EnviTool.

The case for China

Sweden is a country of very high penetration of the ISO 14001 standard, and the use of the standard is in a mature phase in most organizations. China, on the other hand, is number one in the world, with more than 70,000 certificates issued. The growth is double-digit. So China is the place to be if you have products for this specific customer group. The users of the standard are yet immature in China, so we knew there were some challenges out there.

The market for legal information tools is overall immature in China and legal compliance is not always on top of the manager’s priority lists. However, Notisum took the first steps, starting in 2009, to take on the challenge to make China our second home market. Many challenges, expected and unexpected, were waiting for EnviTool.

Step one – the product

Like many commercial ventures, the EnviTool project was the result of a randomly started chain of events. Our Swedish CEO was playing golf with a professor at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The professor was in charge of a student exchange program between National University of Singapore (NUS) and KTH. We were asked to host an internship for an ambitious computer science student in our company for one academic year.

The internship was successful, our student was doing a great job and we learned a lot about Asia and the Chinese culture. We have now hosted three excellent NUS students from Singapore, all good representatives of their university and their country. And all of them bilingual English and Chinese. That’s when we decided that China would be an interesting market to try. And yes – China is far away from Sweden, it is terribly big and it was really too large a challenge for our company. We wanted to try anyway, with the hope that Singapore could be the bridge for us.

We decided to start a subsidiary in Singapore and so we did. It is easy, by the way. According to the World Bank, Singapore ranks number one in the world in ease of doing business. Coming from Sweden, ranked number 50 in the world in terms of how easily you pay your taxes, I had an almost religious moment when we got a letter of gratitude from the Singaporean tax authorities after paying our taxes. Not so in Sweden, I may add…

With the first NUS intern now as our first employee, we started translating and adapting our internet tool together with our development manager in Sweden. The technological challenges were there, of course. We base our technology on the Microsoft.NET platform, but the support for the simplified Chinese character set was not totally implemented everywhere. Multi-language support was developed, and plenty were the occasions in the beginning when Swedish words popped up unexpectedly. The search function in Chinese is different in EnviTool and the relations between the legislative documents were so different from the Swedish and European law that we had to re-design our database structure.

Step two – the market research

With good help from the Swedish Trade Council in China, we did market research to see if there could be a similar market in China and if our business model could work.

After three journeys and two projects together with the trade council, we decided to give it a try. The EnviTool China project was about to take off. Learning to eat properly with chopsticks was part of the experience. Learning to appreciate the Chinese food was easier although there are some zoological challenges there too, outside the scope of this blog entry.

At this point in time we also employed a Chinese/Swedish project manager with extensive knowledge and experience in the field.

Step three – the content

Translating the tool to Chinese and English was the easy part. When it came to the content, we had to throw out everything from Sweden and put in Chinese legislation and comments. We soon found interesting challenges.

Our first experience of the Chinese legal tradition,which is in many ways different from where we come from, was the search for a standard for citations. In the Swedish databases we had successfully used computer software to automatically find citations, law titles, cross references and other document data. It became clear to us that there were no shortcuts in the Chinese material. We had to input all data manually.

We decided to restrict the information to cover relevant legislation in the EHS (Environmental, Health & Safety) and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) field and to concentrate on the national level with some provincial/municipal areas like Beijing and Shanghai. The EHS/CSR users are professionals in their field of work and their industries. They are not lawyers and not very used to legal information systems. EnviTool were developed with EHS/CSR managers in our minds. We wrote the editorial content to suit the needs of our target audience.

We realized that we needed a partner in China to provide fast and timely information. In ChinaLawInfo, established by Peking University in association with the university’s Legal Information Center, we found a great partner. They are the most important legal information provider in China and we saw that Notisum of Sweden and ChinaLawInfo had many similarities in experience and way of working. Yes, we are small and they are big, but that goes for Sweden and China all over. So EnviTool now provides the EHS/CSR laws and regulations from both ChinaLawInfo and government sources. We also have an on-going editorial co-operation in Beijing.

By now we also had good content. The EnviTool Internet service and database, provided from our Singapore company servers, were released in its first version in the fall of 2010.

Step four – market introduction

If company start-up was a short track in Singapore, it was a longer journey in the world’s second biggest economy. After having tried 50 other names, Envitool finally was translated to 安纬同 in Chinese and we got the business permit in August 2011.

We employed the people we needed and found a partner to help us with HR and finance issues. Since then we have started our sales and marketing activities, moving slowly forward. The use of legal information tools served from Singapore is combined with management consulting from our team in Shanghai. We provide training in using the tool and can assist the clients in finding the laws and regulations relevant to their operation.

The second generation of the site is up and running at www.envitool.com and we are proud to have customers from China, the US, Japan and four different European countries.

What we have learned and what we think of the future

To get to know China and the Chinese people is of course one part of the fun. Being a European, you make many mistakes, sometimes because of language, sometimes cultural.

One example of this confusion was when I intervened in the editorial process. In EnviTool we provide bi-lingual Chinese/English short and long comments to laws and regulations. In the Swedish service, which I am more familiar with, the short comment is rendered in italics with the longer comment below in plain text. In the English version of the comments in EnviTool, the short one was not in italics. I complained and our programmer quickly changed this. Shortly thereafter, at a customer meeting, I showed the comments, now in Chinese language version. (I don’t understand a word of Chinese.) Can you imagine Chinese characters in italics? I can tell you, it makes no sense and it looks bad. That was the language mistake. The cultural mistake was managerial. A Swedish employee would have told me how stupid I were, if I came up with such a bad idea. The Asian employee (highly intelligent and highly educated) probably saw the problem and maybe thought “the boss is more stupid than usual, but he is my boss so I have better do what he tells me!”. A lot to learn, many aspects to consider.

To conclude, the start-up was a bit slow because of the red tape but so far, our government contacts have been smooth. We have felt very welcome at the Chinese authorities like the Ministry of Environmental Protection and local governments. In the end, our goals are similar: better environmental and occupational health & safety legal compliance – better environment and better life for the citizens.

We know it will take a long time for us to get the knowledge and experience needed to be a significant player in the Chinese market, and we are prepared to stay there and step by step build our presence. It took many years to build a loyal and substantial customer base in Sweden. It will take even longer in China.

Magnus Svernlöv is the founder and chairman of the Swedish online legal publisher Notisum (www.notisum.se) and its Chinese subsidiary Envitool (www.envitool.cn). He holds an MBA from INSEAD, France, a MScEE degree from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden and a BA from the School of Business, Ecnomics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He welcomes any comment or feedback to ms@notisum.se

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

As a first year law student, a handful of things are given to you (at least where I studied): a pre-fabricated schedule, a non-negotiable slate of professors, and a basic history lesson — illustrated through individual cases. During my first year, the professor I fought with the most was my property law teacher. Now, I realize that it wasn’t her that I couldn’t accept; it was the implications of the worldview she presented. She saw “property law” as a construct through which wealthy people protected their interests at the expense of those who didn’t have the means to defend themselves. Every case — from “fast fox, loose fox” on down — was an example of someone’s manipulating or changing the rules to exclude the poor from fighting for their interests. It was a pretty radical position to accept and I, maybe to my own discredit, ignored it.

Then, I graduated. I began looking at legal systems around the world and tried to get a sense of how they actually function in practice. I found something a bit startling: they don’t function. Or, at least not for most of us.

Justice: Inaccessible

At first glance, that may seem alarmist. Honestly, it feels a bit radical to say. But, then consider that in 2008, the United Nations issued a report entitled Making the Law Work for Everyone, which estimated that 4 billion people (of a global population of 6 billion at the time) lacked “meaningful” access to the rule of law.

Stop for a second. Read that again. Two-thirds of the world’s population don’t have access to rule-of-law institutions. This means that they lack, not just substantive representation or equal treatment, but even the most basic access to justice.

Now, before you write me, and the UN, off completely as crackpots, I must make some necessary caveats. “Rule-of-law institutions,” in the UN report, means formal, governmentally sponsored systems. The term leaves out pluralistic systems, which rely on adapted or traditional actors, many of which exist exclusively outside of the purview of government, to settle civil or small-scale criminal disputes. Similarly, the word “meaningful,” in this context, is somewhat ambiguous. Making the Law Work for Everyone isn’t clear about what standards it uses to determine what constitutes “access,” “fairness,” or relevant and substantive law (i.e., the number and content of laws). While the report’s major focus was on adapting an appropriate level of formalism in order to create inclusive systems, the strategy of definitionally avoiding pluralism and cultural relativism while assessing a global standard of an internationally (and often constitutionally) protected service significantly complicates the analysis offered in the report.

What’s causing the gap in access to justice?

So, let’s work from the basics. The global population has been rising steadily for, well, a while now, increasing the volume of need addressed by legal systems. Concurrently, the number of countries has grown, and with them young legal systems, often without precedents or established institutional infrastructures. As the number of legal systems has grown, so too have the public’s expectations of the ability of these systems to provide formalized justice procedures. Within each of these nations, trends like urbanization, the emergence of new technologies, and the expansion of regulatory frameworks add complexity to the number of laws each domestic justice system is charged with enforcing. On top of this, the internationalization and proliferation of treaties, trade agreements, and institutions imposes another layer of complexity on what are often already over-burdened enforcement mechanisms. It’s understandable, then, why just about every government in the world struggles, not only to create justice systems that address all of these very complicated issues, but also to administer these systems so that they offer universally equal access and treatment.

Predictably, private industry observed these trends a long time ago. As a result, it should be no surprise that the cost of legal services has been steadily rising for at least 20 years. Law is fairly unique in that it is in charge of creating its own complexity, which is also the basis of its business model. The harder the law is to understand, the more work there is for lawyers. This means fewer people will have the specialized skills and relationships necessary to successfully achieve an outcome through the legal system.

What’s even more confusing is that because clients’ needs and circumstances vary so significantly, it’s very difficult to reliably judge the quality of service a lawyer provides. The result is a market where people, lacking any other reliable indicator, judge by price, aesthetics, and reputation. To a limited extent, this enables lawyers to self-create high-end market demand by inflating prices and, well, wearing really nice suits. (Yes, this is an oversimplification. But they do, often, wear REALLY nice suits). The result is the exclusion (or short-shrifting) of middle- and low-income clients who need the same level of care, but are less concerned with the attire. Incidentally, the size and spending power of the market being excluded — even despite growing wealth inequality — are enormous.

Redesigning legal services

I don’t mean to be simplistic or to re-state widely understood criticisms of legal systems. Instead, I want to establish the foundations for my understanding of things. See, I approach this from a design viewpoint. The two perspectives above — namely, that of governments trying to implement systems, and that of law firms trying to capitalize on available service markets — often neglect the one design perspective that determines success: that of the user. When we’re judging the success of legal systems, we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about what the average person encounters when trying to engage legal systems. For most people, the accessibility (both physical and intellectual) and procedure of law, are as determinative of participation in the justice system as whether the system meets international standards.

The individuals and organizations on the cutting edge of this thinking, in my understanding, are those tasked with delivering legal services to low-resource and rural populations. Commercial and governmental legal service providers simply haven’t figured out a model that enables them to effectively engage these populations, who are also the world’s largest (relatively) untapped markets. Legal aid providers, however, encounter the individuals who have to overcome barriers like cost, time, education, and distance to just preserve the status quo, as well as those who seek protection. From the perspective of legal aid clients, the biggest challenge to accessing the justice system may be the fact that courts are often located dozens of miles away from clients’ homes, over miserable roads. Or the biggest challenge may be the fact that clients have to appear in court repeatedly to accomplish what seem like small tasks, such as extensions or depositions. Or the biggest challenge may be simply not knowing whom to approach to accomplish their law-related goals. Each of these challenges represents a barrier to access to justice. Each barrier to access, when alleviated, represents an opportunity for engagement and, if done correctly, an opportunity for financial sustainability.

Mobile points the way

None of this is intended as criticism — almost every major service industry in the world grapples with the same challenges. Well, with the exception of at least one: the mobile phone industry. The emergence of mobile phones presents two amazing opportunities for the legal services industry: 1) the very real opportunity for effective engagement with low-income and rural communities; and 2) an example of how, when service offerings are appropriately priced, these communities can represent immensely profitable commercial opportunities.

Let’s begin with a couple of quick points of information. Global mobile penetration (the number of people with active cell phone subscriptions) is approximately 5.3 billion, which is 78 percent of the world’s population. There are two things that every single one of those mobile phone accounts can do: 1) make calls; and 2) send text messages. Text messaging, or SMS (Short Message Service), is particularly interesting in the context of legal services because it is a way to actively engage with a potential client, or a client, immediately, cheaply, and digitally. There are 4.3 billion active SMS users in the world and, in 2010, the world sent 6.1 trillion text messages, a figure that has tripled in the last 3 years and is projected to double again by 2013. That’s more than twice the global Internet population of 2 billion. It’s no exaggeration, at this point, to say that mobile technology is transformative to, basically, everything. What has not been fully explored is why and how mobile devices can transform service delivery in particular settings.

Why is SMS so promising?

Something well-understood in the technology space is the value of approaching people using the platforms that they’re familiar with. In fact, in technology, the thing that matters most is use. Everything has to make sense to a user, and make things easier than they would be if the user didn’t use the system. This thinking largely takes place in technology spaces, in the niche called “user-interface design.” (Forgive the nerdy term, lawyers. Forgive the simplicity, fellow tech nerds.) These are the people who design the way that people engage with a new piece of technology.

In this way, considering it has 4.3 billion users, SMS has been one of the best, and most simply, designed technologies ever. SMS is instant, (usually) cheap, private, digital, standardized, asynchronous (unlike a phone call, people can respond whenever they want), and very easy to use. These benefits have made it the most used digital text-based communication tool in human history.

User-Interface-Design Principles + SMS + Legal Services = ?

So. What happens when you take user-interface design thinking, and apply it to legal systems? Recognizing that the assumptions underlying most formal legal systems arose when those systems originated (most of the time hundreds of years ago), how would we update or change what we do to improve the functioning of legal systems?

There are a lot of good answers to those questions, and moves toward transactional representation, form standardization (à la LegalZoom), legal process outsourcing (à la Pangea3), legal information systems (there are a lot), and process automation (such as document assembly) are all tremendously interesting approaches to this work. Unfortunately, I’m not an expert on any of those.

FrontlineSMS:Legal

I work for an organization called FrontlineSMS, where I also founded our FrontlineSMS:Legal project. What we do, at FrontlineSMS, is design simple pieces of technology that make it easier to use SMS to do complex and professional engagement. The FrontlineSMS:Legal project seeks to capitalize on the benefits of SMS to improve access to justice and the efficiency of legal services. That is, I spend a lot of my time thinking about all the ways in which SMS can be used to provide legal services to more people, more cheaply.

And the good news is, I think, that there are a lot of ways to do this. Pardon me while I geek out on a few.

Intake and referral

The process of remote legal client intake and referral takes a number of forms, depending on the organization, procedural context, and infrastructure. Within most legal processes, the initial interview between a service provider and a client is an exceptionally important and complex interaction. There are, however, often a number of simpler communications that precede and coordinate the initial interview, such as very basic information collection and appointment scheduling, which could be conducted remotely via SMS.

Given the complexity of legal institutions, providing remote intake and referral can significantly reduce the inefficiencies that so-called “last-mile” populations — i.e., populations who live in “areas …beyond the reach of basic government infrastructure or services — face in seeking access to services. The issue of complexity is often compounded by the centralization of legal service providers in urban areas, which requires potential clients to travel just to begin these processes. Furthermore, most rural or extension services operate with paper records, which are physically transported to central locations at fixed intervals. These records are not particularly practical from a workflow management perspective and often are left unexamined in unwieldy filing systems. FrontlineSMS:Legal can reduce these barriers by creating mobile interfaces for digital intake and referral systems, which enable clients to undertake simple interactions, such as identifying the appropriate service provider and scheduling an appointment.

Client and case management

After intake, most legal processes require service providers to interact with their clients on multiple occasions, in order to gather follow-up information, prepare the case, and manage successive court hearings. Recognizing that each such meetings require people from last-mile communities to travel significant distances, the iterative nature of these processes often imposes a disproportionate burden on clients, given the desired outcome. In addition, many countries struggle to provide sufficient postal or fixed-line telephone services, meaning that organizing follow-up appointments with clients can be a significant challenge. These challenges become considerably more complicated in cases that have multiple elements requiring coordination between both clients and institutions.

Similarly, in order to follow up with clients, service providers must place person-to-person phone calls, which can take significant chunks of time. Moreover, internal case management systems originate from paper records, causing large amounts of duplicative data entry and lags in data availability.

To alleviate these problems, we propose that legal service providers install a FrontlineSMS:Legal hub in a central location, such as a law firm or public defender’s office. During the intake interview, service agents would record the client’s mobile number and use SMS as an ongoing communications platform.

By creating a sustained communications channel between service providers and clients, lawyers and governments could communicate simple information, such as hearing reminders, probation compliance reminders, and simple case details. Additionally, these communications could be automated and sent to entire groups of clients, thereby reducing the amount of time required to manage clients and important case deadlines. This set of tools would reduce the barriers to communication with last-mile clients and create digital records of these interactions, enabling service providers to view all of these exchanges in one easy-to-use interface, reducing duplicative data entry and improving information usability.

Caseload- and service-extension agent management

Although this article focuses largely on innovations that improve direct access to legal services for last-mile populations, the same tools also have the effect of improving internal system efficiency by digitizing records and enabling a data-driven approach to measuring outcomes. Both urban and rural service extension programs have a difficult time monitoring their caseloads and agents in the field. The same communication barriers that limit a service provider’s ability to connect with last-mile clients also prevent communication with remote agents. Mobile interfaces have the effect of lowering these barriers, enabling both intake and remote reporting processes to feed digital interfaces. These digital record systems, when used effectively, inform a manager’s ability to allocate cases to the most available service provider.

Applied to legal processes, supervising attorneys can use the same SMS hubs that administer intake and case management processes to digitize their internal management structures. One central hub, fed by the intake process that information desks often perform, and remote input where service extension agents exist can allow managers to assign cases to individual service providers, and then track them through disposition. In doing so, legal service coordinators will be able to track each employee’s workload in real time. In addition, system administrators will be able to look at the types and frequency of cases they take on, which will inform their ability to allocate resources effectively. If, for example, one area has a dramatically higher number of cases than another, it may make sense to deploy multiple community legal advisors to adequately address the area of greatest need.

Ultimately, though, SMS use in legal services remains largely untested. FrontlineSMS is currently working with several partners to design specific mobile interfaces that meet their needs. These efforts will definitely turn up new and interesting things that can be done using SMS and, particularly, FrontlineSMS. These projects, however, are still largely in the design phase.

In addition to practical implementation challenges, there are a large number of challenges that lie ahead, as we begin to consider the implications of the professional use of SMS. Issues such as security, privacy, identity, and chain of custody will all need to be addressed as systems adapt to include new technologies. There are a number of brilliant minds well ahead on this, and we’ve even jury-rigged a few solutions ourselves, but there will be plenty to learn along the way.

The potential is great

What is clear, though, is that SMS has the potential to improve cost efficiencies, engage new populations, and, for the first time, build a justice system that works for the people who need it most.

I don’t think any of this will square me with my property-law professor. I’m not sure I’ll ever fix property law. But I do think that by reaching out to new populations using the technologies in their pockets, we can make a difference in the way people interact with the law. And even if that’s just a little bit, even if it just enables one percent more people to protect their homes, start a business, or pursue a better life, isn’t that worth it?

The UELMA addresses important issues in information management, providing sound guidance to states that are transitioning legal publications to digital formats. The Act is citizen-oriented, and leaves all issues concerning commercial publishing to state policy and contract law. Most importantly, the Act is outcomes-based, keeping it flexible in the face of changing technologies and evolving state practice. A brief account of UELMA’s development and its main provisions is included in this posting.

The UELMA was drafted in response to a request from the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), following the AALL’s 2007 National Summit on Authentication of Digital Legal Information. The purpose of the Summit was to bring national attention to the issues surrounding the rapid rise in the number of states publishing primary legal information resources electronically and, in some cases, cancelling print resources and publishing legal information only in electronic format. Foremost among the issues were ensuring the trustworthiness of online legal resources and preserving the electronic publications to provide for continuing accessibility. The drafting of a uniform act on these topics was one of the top recommendations of the Summit’s attendees.

The ULC agreed to consider the development of a uniform law and appointed a Study Committee for that purpose. The Study Committee recommended that a law be developed and a Drafting Committee was charged with the task. After two years of consideration, including several face-to-face meetings, conference calls, and circulation of numerous drafts by email, the UELMA was read to and debated for the second time at the Annual Meeting of NCCUSL in July 2011. After more than six hours of floor consideration, the NCCUSL Committee of the Whole passed the draft act, sending it to a Vote of the States. UELMA passed its final hurdle with a positive Vote of the States, gaining approval by a vote of 45-0 (with 1 abstention and 7 jurisdictions not voting).

The UELMA, as it passed the Conference, requires a state that publishes official versions of its legal information in electronic format to do three things:

1. Authenticate the information, by providing a method to determine that the legal material is unaltered from the version published by the state officer or employee that publishes the material;
2. Preserve the information; and
3. Ensure public accessibility on a permanent basis.

At a minimum, legal material that is covered by the Act includes the most basic of state-level legal information resources, including the state constitution, session laws, codified laws or statutes, and state agency rules with the effect of law. In recognition of potential separation of powers issues, the UELMA does not automatically include judicial or executive materials, leaving it to the enacting state to decide whether and how to include those resources. States may choose to include court rules and decisions, state administrative agency decisions, executive official documents, or almost any other information resources they designate as legal material.

For each type of legal material, the state must name a state agency or official as the “official publisher.” The official publisher has the responsibility to authenticate, preserve, and provide access to the legal material. If legal material defined by the Act is published only electronically, that material must be designated “official” and meet the requirements of the Act. If there is a print version of the legal material, an official publisher may designate the online version “official,” but the requirements of the Act to authenticate, preserve, and provide access must be met for the electronic version.

The requirements of the Act are not ended if the official electronic legal material is superseded, overruled, or otherwise ceases to be current law. Legal material does not lose its value even if it is no longer in effect. Accordingly, once a source is designated as official, it continues to be covered by the provisions of the UELMA. Historical sources must be preserved and made available.

The Act does not affect any relationships between an official state publisher and a commercial publisher, leaving those relationships to contract law. Copyright laws are unaffected by the Act. The Act does not affect the rules of evidence; judges continue to make decisions about the admissibility of electronic evidence in their courtrooms.

Some issues specific to one of the three parts of the Act (authentication, preservation, and public access) are as follows. More information on these points can be found in the comments to the Act.

Authentication (Sections 5 and 6) :

The Drafting Committee considered a wide range of approaches to authentication before settling on a policy of presenting a technology-neutral, outcomes-based document, leaving the choice of method used to authenticate legal material up to the states. This approach also leaves it to each state’s discretion to change methods, as necessary or desirable. What is required is that the official publisher provides a method for the user to determine that the electronic record is unaltered from the one published by the official publisher.

By the terms of the Act, the authenticated electronic legal material will receive a presumption of accuracy, the same presumption that is created by publication of legal material in print form. The burden of proving inaccuracy shifts to the party that disputes the accuracy of the electronic legal material. Electronic legal material from other states with substantially similar laws will receive the same presumption of accuracy.

Preservation (Section 7):

The Drafting Committee spent considerable time debating the preservation provisions. The biggest issues were finding a way to describe what legal material would be covered by a preservation requirement, and how legal material should be preserved.

The Drafting Committee decided that, ultimately, all legal material covered by the Act’s authentication provisions should also be subject to its preservation requirements. This was stated simply as requiring preservation of legal material “that is or was designated as official” under the Act. This language requires that states preserve superseded or amended legal material, which retains importance despite its no longer being currently effective. The comments to Section 7 make clear that the Drafting Committee intended the Act to cover not only the text of the law, but also the materials commonly published with the legal material. This would mean that the lists of legislators and state officials typically published with session laws would be preserved, as would proposed or final state constitutional amendments, legislative resolutions, and any other type of information published with a legal material source.

The Drafting Committee decided to use an outcomes-based approach for the preservation requirements, similar to its approach to authentication. The ultimate outcome of preservation is that legal material may be preserved in an electronic format, in print, or by whatever method the state may choose in the future; consistent with an outcomes-based approach, state policy and preference dictate the preservation method.

If legal material is preserved electronically, the UELMA requires that the integrity of the record be ensured, including through backup and disaster recovery preparations, and that the continuing usability of the legal material is ensured. Recent natural disasters in the U.S. have highlighted the importance of disaster recovery preparations. Further, information that is preserved in an unusable format is of no value. The comments make clear that migration to new formats or storage media will be required from time to time.

The comments also note that the Drafting Committee intended that legally significant formatting be preserved. The complexity of presentation of some legal materials — evident in indentations, italicization, and numbering of internal subdivisions, for example — may indicate or explain legislative or regulatory intent. Preservation should not change the meaning of the legal material, but rather should ensure that the legal material is capable of being authenticated.

The Act recognizes that states have decades, and in some instances centuries, of expertise in preserving print materials, and does not specify preservation requirements or outcomes if the state chooses to preserve legal material in print. Nor does the Act impose a duty on an enacting state to retrospectively convert its print material to an electronic format. If, however, the state chooses to digitize previously non-electronic legal material, and if that newly electronic legal material is designated as official, then the requirements of the Act must be met. Publication of legal material in an official electronic version subsequent to the adoption of the UELMA, even if the same legal material was published previously in print, triggers the requirements of the Act.

Permanent Access (Section 8):

Citizens must be informed as to government actions if they are to participate effectively in their government. Legal material is an essential information source for citizens to access to become informed. The UELMA recognizes this in requiring reasonable availability, on a permanent basis, of legal material, even that which is amended, repealed, or superseded.

The Drafting Committee debated conditions of access over several meetings, finally concluding that states already have long-term, relevant experience in making other materials available through archives, libraries, and state offices. The enacting state has discretion to decide where, when, and how to provide access, including whether to charge fees for access. Section 8’s requirement of permanent access does not require a state to provide unlimited access to its preserved legal information. This drafting decision is consistent with the rest of the UELMA, which defers to state policy and practice in its other provisions. Eventually, the Committee decided that the individual states could set their own requirements for access to legal material preserved under the Act, as long as the access is reasonable and in perpetuity. For this reason, the Act does not address whether states can charge fees for access to preserved electronic legal material.

Throughout its deliberations, the Drafting Committee was advised and informed by a large number of advisors and observers who came from federal and state governments, commercial legal publishers and software vendors, and a number of interested organizations. Two American Bar Association advisors brought knowledge of and experience with technologies to the drafting process. The observers were very helpful in assisting the Committee in its understanding of the possible impacts of proposed sections of the Act. In some instances, the observers were able to explain existing and emerging technologies that might be used to accomplish the Act’s specified outcomes. The Committee watched technology demonstrations and investigated various authentication processes already in effect. The drafting process was strengthened by the level of support and expertise the advisors and observers brought, but, in the end, the Act was entirely the Committee’s work.

By designating the Committee’s product a uniform law, the ULC recognized the importance of the topic and urged wide adoption of the Act. The final step in the UELMA’s development will be its introduction into state legislatures. Bill sponsors are being identified, and the ULC anticipates the UELMA will be introduced in at least 8 states in January 2012, with the possibility of introduction in as many as 12.

The ULC has appointed an Enactment Committee for the UELMA to assist the larger ULC Legislative Committee with its charge to “endeavor to secure the enactment of [uniform] legislation.” The Enactment Committee prepares “talking points” and summaries of the legislation, and works with individual legislatures, on occasion, to answer questions and further the introduction and approval of the Act. Volunteers from several interested associations are also preparing to work towards the Act’s approval. With strong support from the ULC and volunteers working on its behalf, by next summer the Uniform Act may itself become “legal material” in one or more states.

Over the past couple of years, there has been a great deal of discussion — particularly in relation to the Durham Statement [1] — about technical standards and preservation issues for law reviews that publish openly and exclusively online. Other colleagues have already blogged or written more formally about the lack of metadata being produced in the production of law reviews, and about problems in indexing open access law journal literature. [2] In a previous VoxPopuLII post, Dr. Núria Casellas discussed the significance of semantic enhancement and how it affects how we should be thinking about providing access to legal information. [3] So I would like to marry the two discussions, by formally asking my academic law librarian colleagues whether the time has come for us to work together to develop an ontology [4], a substantive knowledge system that could be used by our law schools’ legal journals in “marking up” content for consumption on the Internet.

This ontology should be applied not only to what we think of as traditional law journal content, but also to “related” content — such as companion blogs, video, data, etc. This related content will inevitably grow, as what we think of as a “journal” evolves. Indeed, a typical “journal” will most likely look very different years from now than it does today. As members of the institutions that publish one of the major forms of literature in law, and as members of organizations that possess significant legal metadata and subject expertise, law librarians are uniquely positioned to facilitate the discoverability and utility of law reviews published on the Web. Such a project also has the potential to support additional projects such as new metrics and ways in which to look at scholarship.

If this system were indeed widely adopted, it could facilitate a type of access to law journal content that has not been accomplished with existing, centralized means of access, such as Google Scholar, the ABA’s project, and commercial databases. Ideally, I would like to see our community develop a cooperative that could provide a hosted technical infrastructure to be used by institutions that lack the financial or technical resources to invest in a major repository service or open source solutions. While this idea seems “utopian” at this point, I think that our community could realistically pursue standards and language for the more “substantive” aspects of the metadata, even if we are unable to agree on the ultimate solutions for preservation or platforms that “serve up” the content. Such an ontology could also serve as a precursor to even more ambitious, collaborative projects to make legal information more accessible and discoverable.

What do you mean by an ontology? Don’t you just mean a taxonomy or “shared vocabulary”?

I frame the idea as an “ontology project” because publishing on the Web has increasingly become about structured, open, Linked Data and marking up content for the Semantic Web [4]. As the significance of Linked Data grows, it is important for us to think about access to legal scholarship in terms of knowledge systems that contemplate access to information in those terms. The use of structured data/schemas in publishing law reviews would be optimized by human knowledge/expertise for the expression of ideas and language to be applied in that data. We need to think about subject access beyond the standard, familiar hierarchical “subjects” that we have come to use in our existing taxonomies, indexing, and classification systems. [5] We should be thinking about these “subjects” in a way that shows deeper interrelationships between concepts and “types” and that “interacts” and is “interoperable” with other systems. The ontology approach contemplates access to information from a variety of perspectives in relational and situational ways.

Law reviews could be published in a way that incorporates a particular ontology that could also be mapped to other ontologies. Linking ontologies in this way would yield useful connections across systems, bodies of knowledge, and perspectives, including multilingual thesauri, interdisciplinary knowledge, and practice-oriented and “pro se” consumer perspectives. Thinking about the project as an “ontology” also brings to mind three other important features of the system: (1) the “philosophical” definition of the term “ontology”; (2) the significance of “language” and subject expertise; and (3) the flexibility that would allow us to build something dynamic and responsive to the ever-changing nature of law. Such an approach contemplates the approach to legal information advocated in Dr. Casellas’s piece. [6]

Don’t legal indexes already do this? Why reinvent the wheel?

When some of these issues were raised last October at the workshop entitled “Implementing the Durham Statement: Best Practices for Open Access Law Journals”, someone asked why we should “reinvent the wheel” when other longstanding systems (e.g., law journal indexes) are already doing this. Most of these longstanding systems are based on paid subscription models and are not open in a way that facilitates rapid response to evolving developments in the law, or use by those who consume legal information. More importantly, this project would really be about facilitating publishing and improving access to online content by providing a quality, substantive, open knowledge structure for journals to use for marking up content and building access into publication. This project would not be an attempt to displace or “usurp” indexes which focus on access to content from the “outside” perspective of the publication itself (and which are increasingly concerned with marketable enhancements like full-text access, search features, user interface, Web 2.0 functionality, etc.).

The “wheels” we might be accused of reinventing also include “federated searching” and Web-scale discovery systems being purchased by libraries, but I think similar arguments about cost, perspective on the content, and scope would still apply. Development of our project and adoption of Web-scale discovery systems are not mutually exclusive. Web-scale discovery systems could potentially integrate and map to our system. In any event, the point is not to “throw out“ existing systems, but to create an additional knowledge structure that is open and potentially informed by and interoperable with other existing systems.

How would we proceed?

There are many approaches to ontology development [7], including derivation from or text-mining of legal texts [8], top-down development by humans, and building upon or extracting from existing ontologies. [9] Any of these methods (or a combination thereof) could work in the case of developing an ontological structure that could be applied to law review content.

A “top–down” approach based on the knowledge of individuals could start with librarians. But it should also involve working with law school faculty and scholars having expertise in particular subject areas, as well as with authors of law journal articles, and editors of law journals themselves (particularly those focusing on specialized legal topics). [10] Each law school has faculty and librarians who possess specialized legal subject knowledge — as well as collections in particular areas of law — that could enrich the project. In addition to contributing their substantive knowledge, librarians would have an opportunity to develop a language and a system that reflect how they think about and look for information.

Other colleagues have already suggested greater engagement with law school faculty, for purposes of learning about how faculty conduct and think about research. [11] A project like this would give us the opportunity to engage our stakeholders respecting how they think about, contextualize, and relate topics. (Perhaps we could learn more about the way law library stakeholders think about information by presenting them with samplings of articles, and inquiring as to how the stakeholders would “expect” to find those articles.) Instead of forcing those knowledgeable about their field to learn the taxonomy and structure we have been given by traditional systems, we would be harvesting the expertise of those subject specialists in order to create richer metadata that contemplates their habits and knowledge. Faculty, authors, and journal editors with subject expertise coupled with law librarians could potentially provide a very sophisticated, dynamic, and responsive system.

We should also consider looking at existing ontologies and other systems, including Library of Congress and other popular and relevant systems used in law. There are several ontologies related to law that could inform the project and that could also potentially be mapped. [12] Systems to be consulted (and mapped) could include ontologies designed for primary law and local knowledge management in legal settings, as well as ontologies in subject areas outside the law. Also, some law schools might have their own local systems that could inform ours.

Finally, while we would probably want to avoid using text mining as the only method, the project should also contemplate doing some mining and extraction from law journal literature itself. Such an approach might be particularly helpful in grappling with older legal concepts and appreciating the use of certain terms/language over time.

Whatever method(s) we select, we have a host of inspiration from other projects in legal informatics and from projects in other disciplines (particularly in the sciences) that strive to provide naming conventions within disciplines, and map knowledge across systems through coordinated efforts. Although it is a much more ambitious project than ours, John Willbanks’ Neurocommons project provides us with a model of how such a project could garner participation and grow, particularly if we were to coordinate with other projects and ontologies being developed. [13]

If we build it, who will use it?

If we do develop such a system, who would actually apply it in publishing law reviews? Hopefully, libraries will take the lead and realize that this is a role that they themselves should be fulfilling. While many libraries facilitate repositories and other platforms for publishing law journals and provide training and reference/research support for cite checking and preemption, many do not provide markup and metadata work on the articles themselves. In a recent survey by Benjamin Keele and me in relation to a paper we have been writing, only 1 in 57 respondents reported doing any work on article metadata for their journals. [14] Librarians are already cataloging books and spending time grappling with metadata development and changes in the ways in which we describe our cataloged resources (RDA, FRBR, etc.). Further, librarians today spend a lot of time and money purchasing or building “repositories” or other platforms for their law journals. Greater support of metadata development for our own institutional output (beyond provision of simplistic taxonomies) is a natural outgrowth of such activities. As other librarians have commented, providing institutional repositories is not sufficient. [15]

Such activity could contemplate new roles for catalogers. A recent NISO Webinar on the impact of Linked Data on library cataloging suggested that library catalogers will be less focused on creating “records” and more concerned with “graphs”. The presenters commented that catalogers will enhance the increasing amount of minimal metadata coming directly from publishers, and provide access to original and local content. [16] Some libraries have already integrated metadata work into their workflows for cataloged resources, and it is possible for a law library to integrate journal work into its technical services workflow. [17] From a reference perspective, librarians are already often exposed to journal content in the early stages of publication through support of preemption checking, student note/comment research help, and cite checking support. Librarians are thereby in a good position to understand the “aboutness” of the content. Such involvement could provide law librarians with a natural progression toward being more involved in helping journals “mark up” their content. It is an opportunity for us embrace more wholeheartedly the role of law libraries as publishers and knowledge managers. Many of our colleagues in the open law movement, in knowledge management in legal practice, and in other disciplines have made forays into this area. [18]

Some would probably argue that libraries do not have sufficient staff to get involved in law journal publishing activities, particularly in markup. In addition, some institutions have entire offices outside the library that support publication activities. Even if libraries feel that they are not in a position to manage the workflow of the application of this knowledge system, the most important contribution librarians can make lies in expertise or intellectual input. Application of this ontology could also be performed by law students themselves or other law school staff. Further, authors themselves are potential users and providers of metadata. In many other disciplines, especially the sciences, more authors are using author add-in tools and other software programs to help mark up their manuscripts for publication. Specialized tools could be developed to facilitate authors’ adding metadata to their own law review articles. (Many law authors are already used to contributing keywords to SSRN papers.)

“But…”: Obstacles and opportunities

As I write this piece, I anticipate comments such as, “That would be too big of an undertaking,” and: “Is that really our role?” While libraries are feeling the pressure of more limited resources and time, I would argue that this project would synergize with libraries’ existing interactions with our primary users (faculty and students) and could be built into other outreach activities. In the end, it could actually help to create an organic system responsive to users’ needs. Pursuing this project in tandem with other coordinated activities to facilitate open access law journals, law librarians would join many of our university library colleagues in thinking of ourselves in the role of producer/publisher and in providing new opportunities for our library staff (both technical services and reference/subject specialists).

I envision a host of other issues and problems (too many to enumerate in this posting) that might arise in relation to a project such as this, but I consider none of them “insurmountable.” Below is a sample of some issues that come to mind:

Coordination/governance: Who would control the project? Who would be the final arbiter of what is adopted? Past discussions of the Durham Statement have suggested the possibility of an organization providing support for journals that tried to “comply” with the Durham Statement. [19] Such an organization might consider taking on a project such as this. Perhaps leadership for this project could evolve in some way out of institutional and personal relationships, such as those that have evolved for collection development, [20] or possibly through some coordinated efforts of American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Special Interest Sections (particularly ALL-SIS, TS-SIS, and RIPS-SIS). If our own institutions are not willing to support such a project, individual librarians on their own (myself included!) might be willing to contribute time and energy to the project. We are also fortunate to have a supportive community of technologists in the open law and knowledge management fields, who could serve as potential partners. The important aspects of the project are that it should be owned by an entity with diverse representation and interests, and that it should be established as something that will be free.

Target content and scope: Would we be framing subjects as they tend to exist in U.S. law review literature? While the structure would be designed for use by law reviews, if it were kept open and without restrictions, it could potentially be adopted by peer-reviewed journals and mapped to other indexing systems, either through Web-scale discovery or other systems. How do we frame an ontology that contemplates incorporation of multiple legal systems and relation to multiple languages? How do we deal with the translation issues that may arise? How would the ontology map to other systems and multilingual thesauri? Should we be contemplating ontologies in other disciplines that have addressed these issues?

Could it be for naught? One might ask, “If we build it, will they come?” Even if provided with such a system (as well as other best practices and support), would law reviews actually adopt it? Even if they do not apply such a system to their data structures, the substantive system that evolves could also be applied from the “outside” by third parties if the content itself is open. While one could argue that this would truly be “reinventing the wheel” in duplicating the efforts of existing indexing systems, one could argue alternatively that the scope, nature, and openness of the resulting system would offer a unique contribution to the indexing environment and would at least provide an additional alternative to the existing systems.

Technical questions: Which particular tools should we use to work collaboratively? What machine-readable formats would we contemplate using? How would we deal technically with systemic changes to the ontology and its application? There is a long list of tools and formats suitable for this project, and of methods for dealing with changes to metadata resources such as ontologies.

How would we contemplate application of this ontology in existing publishing platforms? What tools would we contemplate journals using to mark up documents with metadata from the ontology? Many of the repositories and platforms libraries are currently using permit enhancement of metadata with keywords, user-generated tags, or existing basic subject categories. But existing repositories and platforms do not necessarily facilitate markup that is optimized for the Semantic Web.

Who is the audience? Who is looking for such an ontology? If the language and concepts are at least in part based on the needs and knowledge of our faculty and students, do we develop something tailored to their use instead of developing something that serves broader norms? How could we take into consideration how others (pro se’s, court personnel, etc.) might be looking for information, and map or relate our ontology to other systems that incorporate those users’ perspectives? How could we develop an ontology that contemplates relating to primary law?

Rights issues: Are there rights issues involved in adaptations or derivations of others’ ontologies? How would we want to handle rights issues/licenses respecting the ontology that we develop? [21] Hopefully, the answer is freely and openly!

So what do you think?

Hopefully, this post will spur a discussion that could be continued on this blog or in another forum. In any event, law libraries should be rethinking their roles in the production of law review metadata. Law libraries should be considering how the evolution of the Semantic Web and cataloging standards might impact how they provide support for their own institution’s journals.

NOTES

This post is based in part on two draft papers: Benjamin Keele and Michelle Pearse, How Law Libraries Can Help Law Journals Publish Better (poster session presented during the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA on July 23-26, 2011), and Michelle Pearse, Whither the Future of Law Journal Indexing?.

[4] Some resources related to this topic appear at http://schema.org and http://linkeddata.org. Some argue that the Semantic Web might already be ill-fated: Janna Quitney Anderson and Lee Rainie, The Fate of the Semantic Web, http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2010/PIP-Future-of-the-Internet-Semantic-web.pdf (Pew Research Center 2010). Tom Gruber defines an ontology as “a specification of a conceptualization”: http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html; Tom Gruber, in the Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Ling Kiu and M. Tamer Ozsu (Eds.), Spring-Verlag, 2009 http://tomgruber.org/writing/ontology-definition-2007.htm and http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Ontology. Joost Breuker and colleagues elaborate: “The term ‘ontology’ may have different meanings: (i) philosophical discipline; (ii) informal conceptual system; (iii) a formal semantic account; (iv) a specification of a conceptualization; (v) a representation of a conceptual system via logical theory, (vi) the vocabulary used by a logical theory, (vii) a meta-level specification of a logical theory.” J. Breuker et al., “The Flood, the Channels and the Dykes,” in Joost Breuker, Pompeu Casanovas, Michael C.A. Klein and Enrico Francesconi, eds., Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web: Channeling the Legal Information Flood (IOS Press 2009), at 11. Adam Wyner defines “ontology” in the following way: “An ontology represents a common vocabulary and organization of information that explicitly, formally, and generally specifies a conceptualization of a given domain. Ontologies are related to knowledge management (cf. Rusanow’s ‘Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer’) and taxonomies (cf. Sherwin’s article ‘Legal Taxonomies’). But an ontology is a more specific, explicit and formal representation of knowledge than provided by KM [knowledge management]; and it is richer and more flexible than a taxonomy….In making an ontology, one turns tacit expert knowledge into explicit representations that can be shared, tested and modified by people as well as processed by a computer.” Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, “Legal Concepts Spin a Semantic Web”, Law Technology News, http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews10/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007&slreturn=1 (June 8, 2009). Dr. Núria Casellas gives a good explanation of the Semantic Web and ontologies: Dr. Núria Casellas, Semantic Enhancement of Legal Information: Are We Up for the Challenge? http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2010/02/15/semantic-enhancement-of-legal-information%e2%80%a6-are-we-up-for-the-challenge/ (February 15, 2010).

[7] Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis and Liam Magee, Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research (Chandos Publishing 2011), at 72 (noting several studies on investigating approaches and software); A Holistic Approach to Collaborative Ontology Development Based on Change Management, 9 Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 299 (2011), doi:10.1016/j.websem.2011.06.007; “Ontologies can be designed by means of methods such as…encompassing top-down expertise elicitation from humans, bottom-up learning from documents, and middle-out application of design patterns, which can be specialized from domain-independent ontologies, extracted from best practices, existing ontologies or other knowledge sources, as well as learnt from conceptual invariances found in experts’ documents.” Aldo Gangemi, “Introducing Pattern-Based Design for Legal Ontologies,” in Joost Breuker, Pompeu Casanovas, Michel C.A. Klein and Enrico Francesconi, eds., Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web: Channelling the Information Flood (IOS Press, 2009), at 53.

[8] Enrico Francesconi, Semantic Processing of Legal Texts: Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language (Springer 2008).

[10] This approach of working with faculty and other scholars from the legal academy would be similar to the “socio-legal” referenced by Dr. Casellas in her post regarding her Institute of Law and Technology project. Dr. Adam Z. Wyner has also advocated web-based collaborative ontolology development where legal professionals contribute to a free, open ontology for law. Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, “Legal Concepts Spin a Semantic Web”, Law Technology News, http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews10/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007&slreturn=1 (June 8, 2009).

[13] Alan Ruttenberg et al., Life Sciences on the Semantic Web: The Neurocommons and Beyond. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 10(2): 193-204 (2009), doi: 10.1093/bib/bbp004 (“The NeuroCommons project seeks to make all scientific research materials – research articles, knowledge bases, research data, physical materials – as available and as usable as they can be. We do this by fostering practices that render information in a form that promotes uniform access by computational agents – sometimes called ‘interoperability’. We want knowledge sources to combine easily and meaningfully, enabling semantically precise queries that span multiple information sources.”).

[14] Benjamin Keele and Michelle Pearse, How Law Libraries Can Help Law Journals Publish Better (poster session presented during the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA on July 23-26, 2011, http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/libpubs/25/).

[19] Wayne Miller, A Foundational Proposal for Making the Durham Statement Real, http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/2325/ (suggesting founding an organization “whose mission is to guarantee the ongoing viability and availability of all publications that adhere to the Durham Statement’s call to action, hereinafter called the Durham Statement Foundation.”); Richard A. Danner, Kelly Leong and Wayne Miller, The Durham Statement Two Years Later: Open Access in the Law School Journal Environment, 103 Law Library Journal 39, 52 (2011), http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/2358/ (noting that the Durham Statement “calls for law schools to end print publication in a planned and coordinated effort led by the legal education community”).

[20] Some examples include the Northeast Foreign Law Libraries Cooperative Group and “B2F2” (currently in the process of being the process of being renamed) with Boston area law librarians.

Michelle Pearse is the Research Librarian for Open Access Initiatives and Scholarly Communication at the Harvard Law School Library where she manages implementation of the law school’s open access policy for its faculty, and other projects related to scholarly communication and open access to legal information and scholarship. She is also involved in efforts to archive born-digital content for the collection, and provides research services to faculty and staff.

[Lexum — the Canadian legal technology firm that created and administers CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute — began its existence as LexUM, a research unit of the University of Montreal. In 2009, LexUM was divided into two parts. One part, called Lexum, became an independent company, while the second part, called the Chair on Legal Information, remained with the University of Montreal. For purposes of simplicity, “LexUM” and “Lexum” will both be referred to in this post as “Lexum.”]

This post also describes my personal experience of participating in this research and learning about free access to law.

Project Overview

At the Chair on Legal Information at the University of Montreal, with a team of researchers situated all over the world, we’ve been working on two on-going research projects since 2009: (1) A review of legal information in four West African countries, and (2) a global study on the sustainability of Free Access to Law initiatives.

In conducting these research projects over more than two years, we have interviewed lawyers, magistrates, judges, law students, public servants, law librarians, and anyone else we could find who could talk about legal information in their countries.

Here is how I came to be involved in this effort.

Being Introduced to Free Access to Law

October 2009: a 6.8-magnitude earthquake hits Indonesia; U.S. President Barack Obama receives the Nobel Peace Prize; we’re in the midst of the global financial crisis; and unbeknownst to me, I’m about to discover a world I have never heard of before: the world of Free Access to Law (FAL).

The idea of Free Access to Law, although it has been around for nearly 20 years in Canada, was entirely new to me in October 2009. Prior to that, I hadn’t worked in the field of law, although I had spent years in its neighbouring field, political science, and worked for a number of groups and organisations involved in issues concerning human rights and social justice.

A fairly simple concept it seemed to me, this FAL creature. How much could there be to know about putting the law on the Internet? Through our research, I was to find that FAL is a very complex phenomenon — a world of knowledge and expertise, questions and debates, values and principles; and a movement in which hundreds upon hundreds of individuals from all around the globe are active — and that many factors influence the effectiveness and sustainability of FAL services.

The First Study: The Use of Free Access to Law Services in West Africa

For the first study, our purpose was to find out how lawyers were accessing and using legal information in our subject countries: Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal, and Togo.

The context for this study was the development of free access to law services in these countries. In the first half of the 2000s, free access to law (FAL) initiatives for the countries of Burkina Faso and Niger — JuriBurkina and JuriNiger, respectively — were launched with the coordination of Lexum. Once JuriBurkina and JuriNiger had begun operations, efforts were soon in place to develop similar sites in Senegal and in Togo. In Senegal, after expressing initial enthusiasm for the idea, the Bar eventually lost interest in the project and declined to cooperate in moving the project forward. In Togo, the Bar expressed its interest in the project a little late, so Lexum included them in a review of legal information project, while seeking their support for FAL efforts at the same time

In our first study, we sought answers to the following questions: What kind of information did lawyers in these countries need, in what format, how often, and for what purpose? How had these FAL Websites changed the way lawyers in these countries do their job?

Here are the key findings of the first study. First, many legal professionals in these countries knew little about the FAL sites’ existence, let alone their purpose. Second, JuriBurkina and JuriNiger were found to have had a limited impact on the way the lawyers who are their target audience conduct their research, mostly because the lawyers either didn’t know about the sites or didn’t find what they were looking for on the sites.

The legal professionals we met during our research were not talking about how they are and have been using the sites, nor how free access to legal information online has changed their research habits. Rather, we were being told about the potential of the sites, and what is likely to change -– and this only in the instances in which the respondent had ever heard of or used either JuriBurkina or JuriNiger.

Third, the content of the FAL sites in these countries was very limited. These content limitations appeared to affect users’ perceptions of the relevance of the sites. When we examine the sites, we see little in the way of updates and few documents. JuriBurkina, hosted locally, was also down on a regular basis until Lexum brought it back on its servers, where it’s been available ever since.

Fourth, contextual factors contributed significantly to these content limitations. In Burkina Faso, Lexum and the local Bar were hoping to launch an all-inclusive legal information portal for the country, where users could access statutes, statutory material, case law, and eventually secondary material as well. Yet restrictions on access to legislative content led to the launch of a site containing mostly case law — in a civil law country. In Niger, access to judgments was greatly limited following the 2010 coup. With a military regime in place, data sources were less than keen on handing over decisions.

Fifth, differential access to technology may have affected the perceived usefulness of the FAL services. Both the lawyers and law students we met in West Africa have greater access to mobile phones (that lack Internet access) than they do to computers with Web access, and the West African FAL sites are available only via the Web.

The Second Study: The Sustainability of Free Access to Law Services

Our second, global study is known as the “Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay?” research project. [Editor’s Note: The first report related to this study is available here.] With partners in Asia, Southern Africa, and West Africa, we have attempted to evaluate how we could ensure that sites providing legal information for free to the public can continue to do so in the long term. We were interested not just in funding models, but also in organizational models, taking into consideration variables related to political, social, and technological contexts. We asked: Can a strong team of dedicated individuals, with know-how and funding, build sustainable FAL initiatives?

For this second project, too, we went around interviewing the usual suspects — users and makers of freely accessible legal information — in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. We asked the makers of FAL such questions as: How were they running their sites, coping with limited resources, deciding on which projects to undertake, and managing relationships with data sources?

Here are some key findings of this study. First, contextual factors, particularly political and technological, are critical to an FAL initiative’s capacity to ensure sustainability. Without the participation of those who make the law, be it legislative or case law, it is difficult for an FAL initiative to fulfill its mission.

Technological contextual factors are of particular importance respecting the sustainability of FAL initiatives. Legal Information Institutes have elected the Web as the best way to offer public and free access to legal information: The Web is relatively cheap, and reaches unparalleled numbers of users instantaneously. But easy and inexpensive Internet access — unfortunately, like many things in this world — is not a universal fact of life. Although perhaps one of the most democratic forums of our time, the Web is still far from being available in most households around the globe. [Editor’s Note: The ITU’s The World in 2010 pamphlet provides recent data on Internet use and access in developing countries.]

Second, respecting securing user buy-in to an FAL site, we found that the key is to ensure that the information published is highly relevant: that it is the information most needed by the site’s users. If FAL is to continue to play the pivotal role it has had in defining how users access legal information, sustainability is going to depend on our capacity to adapt, such that we provide a service needed by specific groups of users operating in specific contexts.

Common Findings of Both Studies

The findings of the studies actually coincide in more than one way. The first concerns the importance to users of the perceived relevance of information available from FAL services. This may seem like an obvious conclusion, but it was not expressly stated by our respondents, and had to be inferred from our data. The users we met had a tendency to speak of the “comprehensiveness” of collections as being one of the primary factors determining whether they would adopt an information source for their professional needs. A strong majority also said that before searching online, they would refer to their firm’s private collection, to their national archives, or to their Bar’s library. But their firm’s private collections were far from being “comprehensive.” What those collections were, though, was targeted, and focused on the lawyers’ specific informational needs.

The second common finding concerns the importance of contextual factors to the sustainability and perceived usefulness of FAL sites. Many free access to law initiatives are faced with limited access to technological, human, and financial resources. For initiatives working under such constraints, carefully choosing which information to prioritize for publication is essential. Yet, as noted above, our research suggests that the information that is published must be perceived as highly relevant by the users of the FAL service, if users are to “buy-in” to the service for the long term and integrate the service into their research practices.

In addition, the contextual factor of technology seems to affect both the sustainability of FAL sites and users’ perceptions of the usefulness of those sites. The evidence from West Africa suggests that the inability of lawyers and law students to access FAL sites via mobile phones may have contributed to users’ perceptions that the sites lacked relevant information. Respecting sustainability, the persistence of low levels of Internet access in developing countries poses a possible obstacle to widespread public buy-in to Web-based FAL services over the long term.

Issues Needing Further Research

In addition to the issues raised by the findings discussed above, our research on the use and sustainability of free access to law services has also highlighted additional issues that warrant further study. The first concerns justice and the rule of law. Free access to law, as a movement, gives itself the mandate to reinforce the rule of law. But in societies where a great social distance divides those who produce the law and those governed by it, we may need to go beyond the concept of law and start thinking about justice.

The second concerns the role of law in highly unequal societies. What is the role of a free access to law initiative in a context in which the law and legal information are not considered to belong to the public? In which legal information — written in a language not spoken by the majority of the population — is effectively the property of the elite? In which the law in force is a tool of oppression and segregation?

The third concerns access to technology and the digital divide. Limitations on Internet access must be taken into consideration not only respecting sustainability and users’ perceptions of the relevance of FAL services, but also to insure the coherency of FAL’s mission to democratize access to legal information. After over a decade of free access to law around the world, we must never stop thinking about what’s next and how we can best ensure open access.

Reflections and Conclusion

April 2011: I’ve now worked on IDRC-funded free access to law projects with Lexum and the Chair on Legal Information at the University of Montreal for just less than two years. When I began this work in the fall of 2009, free access to law seemed to me to be a relatively “simple” concept. Now, after eighteen months of research, I’ve come to understand the complexity and large scope of free access to law: that it involves hundreds of professionals working on six continents; that its success and sustainability are influenced by numerous technological, political, and social factors; and that its value depends in large part on cultivating relationships with users in their particular social and cultural contexts.

Keep an eye out for our case studies coming out this summer—but to sum things up for now, it would be simply that, like most things in the social sciences, one size does not fit all.

[Editor’s Note: The original version of this post contained an error. The original version of the post stated that the studies described in the post are being conducted by Lexum and the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal. That information is incorrect. The studies described in the post are being conducted solely by the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal. Lexum has no role in the studies. We regret the error. The post has been corrected as of 5 May 2011.]

The launch of legislation.gov.uk by The [UK] National Archives marks a step change in public access to a primary source of legal information for citizens in the UK. Legislation.gov.uk is extensive, covering the four jurisdictions that make up the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and over 800 years of history.

John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy at The National Archives, writes:

First, some background

We had two objectives with legislation.gov.uk: to deliver a high quality public service for people who need to consult, cite, and use legislation on the Web; and to expose the UK’s Statute Book as data, for people to take, use, and re-use for whatever purpose or application they wish. In particular, our aim was to show how the statute book can contribute to the growing Web of data as well as to the Web of documents.

Legislation.gov.uk replaces two predecessor services the UK government set up to provide access to legislation. The first was created by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO), later to become the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), which is responsible for the official publication of legislation, and the London, Belfast and Edinburgh Gazettes. The functions of HMSO have been operating from The National Archives since 2006, including the provision of public access to legislation online. HMSO started publishing new legislation on the Web in 1996. Where HMSO and later OPSI provided access to legislation as it was enacted or made, a second service was developed, to provide access to the UK Statute Law Database. This contains revised versions of primary legislation, showing how they have changed over time.

Browsing the many different types of legislation in the UK

As in the United States, most lawyers in the UK rely on pay-for commercial legal research services. The people using the government’s online legislation service are generally not lawyers, but are drawn from a much wider group of people who need to know, cite, or use legislation as part of their job. These can range from police officers, to head teachers, to citizens defending their rights. Our users are people who need to know what a statute says, and who go looking for it using Google. They then quickly find their way to legislation.gov.uk.

What do people think they are seeing?

Before starting work on legislation.gov.uk, we did some research into the users of both the OPSI service and the UK Statute Law Database service. This research showed that they were very well used (over 1.5 million unique visitors per month to www.opsi.gov.uk), but that most of the people accessing legislation on the Web were not clear about the status of the material they were looking at. Our research showed that many people using legislation online assume that what they are looking at is both current and in force, simply because it is on the Web and available from an official source. Often users were accessing the original or as-enacted version of a statute, not knowing that they should be looking at the revised version, or that a revised version even existed.

Intuitive presentation

Our job is to present legislative material in such a way that the context and status of the information are clear. Legislation is complicated to understand; for example, an Act may have multiple sections, each with a different commencement date, or the Act may have prospective provisions. With legislation.gov.uk we have tried to develop a user interface that makes the status of each Act clear, so people know whether the statute they are viewing is current and in force. The usability challenge is to align what people think they are seeing with what they are actually looking at. We have done this by presenting both an original (see, e.g., here) and a latest-available version (see, e.g., here) of each Act, and a toggle between the two.

For more advanced users there is a timeline (see, e.g., here) which can be turned on to see how the legislation has changed and to navigate through an Act at particular points in time, including future or prospective versions.

Point in time navigation and the timeline

Open data

On the surface, legislation.gov.uk is an attractive Website, providing simple and direct access to legislation; at legislation.gov.uk people can view whole Acts, or a particular section, in either HTML (see, e.g., here) or in a print version in PDF (see, e.g., here). To achieve this, under the hood two very different sources of data have been combined. The data model for the original (or as-enacted) versions of legislation is largely driven by the typographic layout of legislative documents. For revised legislation, the data model is largely driven by version control, the management of multiple versions of different segments of a statute at different points in time. Reconciling these two different data models was a prerequisite step to developing our system.

An ‘on the fly’ created PDF

We aimed to make legislation.gov.uk a source of open data from the outset. The importance of open legal data is made powerfully by people like Carl Malamud and the Law.Gov campaign. Our desire to make the statute book available as open data motivated a number of technology choices we made. For example, the legislation.gov.uk Website is built on top of an open Application Programming Interface (API). The same API is available for others to use to access the raw data.

Using the API

The simplest way to get hold of the underlying data on legislation.gov.uk is to go to a piece of legislation on the Website, either a whole item, or a part or section, and just append /data.xml or /data.rdf to the URL. So, the data for, say, Section 1 of the Communications Act 2003, which is at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/1, is available at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/1/data.xml. We have taken a similar approach with lists, both in browse and search results. When looking at any list of legislation on legislation.gov.uk, it is easy to view the data. Simply append /data.feed to return that list in ATOM. (See, e.g., here.)

Open standards have played an important role throughout the development of legislation.gov.uk. All the data is held in XML, using a native XML database. The application logic is similarly constructed using open standards, in XSLTs and XQueries. Data and application portability were key objectives. We made considerable use of open source software like Orbeon Forms, Squid, and Apache.

The XML conforms to the Crown Legislation Markup Language (CLML) and associated schema. More general interchange formats for legislation such as CEN MetaLex lack the expressive power we need for UK legislation, but could relatively easily be wrapped around the XML we are making available. We have sought to surface richer metadata about legislation using RDF, but we would welcome feedback from users of the XML data about whether a MetaLex wrapper would be useful. (Note: We have used the MetaLex vocabulary in our RDF along with FRBR, as discussed below.) Similarly, it should be relatively easy to add a wrapper for the OAI-PMH protocol on top of the API we have built. We are not yet clear who would make use of such a service, if we built one, or whether we should leave the creation of an OAI-PMH interface to others. It is another open issue where we would welcome some feedback.

Persistent URIs

A major influence on legislation.gov.uk was a blog posting by Rick Jelliffe for O’Reilly’s XML.com. Jelliffe writes about something he calls PRESTO. He describes this as a system for legislation and public information in which “all documents, views and metadata at all significant levels of granularity and composition should be available in the best formats practical from their own permanent hierarchical URIs.”

We wanted to create high quality, persistent URIs for UK legislation from the outset. There are a number of different ways one might assign an unequivocal identifier to a legislative document. We have decided to use HTTP URIs and see no particular advantage in using URNs over HTTP URIs and indeed some disadvantages with URNs. Most importantly, HTTP URIs are actionable names. The advantage is that there is a built-in, ready-made, widely deployed and cost-effective resolution mechanism for resolving the identifier to a document, and a document to a representation. Having said that, we would consider supporting URN:LEX URNs in addition to our own URI Set, and would greatly welcome feedback from the community on this issue -– so please do comment if you have a view.

Our document URIs refer to particular documents on the Web, for example the current, in-force version of a particular section of an Act. (See, e.g., here.) Crucially there are also point-in-time URIs for documents, which shows how that Act stood on a particular date (/yyyy-mm-dd) (see, e.g., here), or how it was when originally made (/enacted) (see, e.g., here). For any document we can return different representations or formats: a Web page on legislation.gov.uk, the underlying XML, a PDF, an HTML snippet, or even some RDF metadata. We recommend that people cite UK legislation in HTML by pointing to the identifier URI and by using the rel=”cite” attribute in the anchor tag.

Of course, we quickly discovered, it is one thing to suggest a design approach like PRESTO, and quite another to actually implement it. Jeni Tennison, who, working as a consultant to The Stationery Office, devised the URI Set for legislation (and much else about the legislation.gov.uk system), has blogged about the limitations of PRESTO and XPath-based URLs. I hope Jeni will find the time to blog some more about legislation.gov.uk, as there are many stories to be told.

One of the earliest pieces of design work we did for legislation.gov.uk was the URI Set. We wanted to follow PRESTO principles, but also account for changes over time, and for some of the peculiarities of UK legislation, in particular different geographic extents. (See, e.g., here.) PRESTO thinking is very evident on legislation.gov.uk; just look at the URLs as you move through the site.

Linked Data

We were also keen that the UK’s Statute Book make a contribution to the growing Web of Linked Data. The UK government is working hard to publish government data using Linked Data standards as part of work on data.gov.uk. The idea of the Web of Linked Data is to connect related information across the Web based on its meaning. In practice this means creating names for things (by ‘thing’ I mean anything: people, places, ideas) using HTTP, and when someone requests some information about that thing, returning data about it, ideally using RDF.

Legislation can make an important contribution to the Web of Linked Data. First, many important concepts and ideas are formally defined by statute. For example, there are 27 types of school in the UK and each one has a statutory definition. (See, e.g., here and here.) What it means to be a private limited company is again defined by statute, as are the UK’s eight data protection principles. One of our objectives with legislation.gov.uk is to enable people creating vocabularies and ontologies to exploit these definitions. This can be done, for example, by using the skos:definition property, to link terms in a vocabulary to the statute. The idea is to ease the process of rooting the Semantic Web in legally defined concepts. Part of the value of this linking is that it enables automatic checking to determine whether a part of the statute book has been repealed, in which case the related concept no longer exists. Crucially, legislation.gov.uk gives accurate information about when a section is repealed, by what piece of legislation, and when that repeal comes into force.

At the moment, the RDF from legislation.gov.uk is limited to largely bibliographic information. We have made use of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the MetaLex vocabularies, primarily to relate the different types of resource we are making available. FRBR has the notion of a work, expressions of that work, manifestations of those expressions, and items. Similarly, MetaLex has the concepts of a BibliographicWork and BibliographicExpression. In the context of legislation.gov.uk, the identifier URIs relate to the work. Different versions of the legislation (current, original, different points in time, or prospective) relate to different expressions. The different formats (HTML, HTML Snippets, XML, and PDF) relate to the different manifestations. We have also made extensive use of Dublin Core Terms, for example to reflect that different versions apply to geographic extents. This is important as, for example, the same section of a statute may have been amended in one way as it applies in Scotland and in another way for England and Wales. We think FRBR, MetaLex, and Dublin Core Terms have all worked well, individually and in combination, for relating the different types of resource that we are making available.

One challenge we have is with changes to legislation that have yet to be applied to the data by the editorial team. Since we know what these effects are, we have also tried to represent this in RDF. We have used the MetaLex vocabulary to do this, but the result is complicated to interpret, and thus we suspect difficult for users of the data. MetaLex does not aid the elegant expression of amendment information (such as: statute A is changed by statute B, but only when commencement order C brings that change into force). We will be developing our own light-weight ontology for expressing some of these relationships, with the primary focus on ease of querying our data, rather than creating an ontology with the expressive power to be a cross-jurisdictional model.

It should then be possible to align this ontology with others post hoc. Our current use of RDF — and the potential to do more — is another issue where we would welcome feedback from the community.

Early adopters

People have already started to make use of the legislation.gov.uk URIs to support their Linked Data. One example is a project by ESD Toolkit. They have a created a SKOS vocabulary for all the different types of service that Local Authorities need to provide. They have linked this vocabulary to the powers and duties placed on Local Authorities in the legislation, using legislation.gov.uk identifier URIs. They have also used the API to pull back some of the text of the relevant statutes.

The future

We think there is huge potential over the next few years in the development of “accountable systems”. These are systems that are explicitly aware of statutory and other legal requirements and are able to process information explicitly in a way that complies with the (ever-changing) law. Here the legislation URIs can help enormously, either for people seeking to develop such accountable systems or any time someone wants to integrate an external system with the official source for statutory information. If the API is used in this way, we will need to consider carefully whether, and if so, how, the data is authenticated. We are not currently supplying digitally signed versions of UK legislation (unlike the GPO in the US) but we will be supporting the use of HTTPS, to provide a reasonable level of secure access to the data. However, if the data starts to be increasingly used in a new generation of accountable systems, we may need to address authenticity, with a view to increasing the guarantees we can make over the data.

There is much more we can do with legislation as data. Parts of the statute book are surprisingly well structured. For example, every year there is one or more Appropriation Acts. These typically contain a schedule with a table listing each government department, the amount allocated to it by Parliament for the year, and what that departments’ objectives are (see, e.g., here). It wouldn’t take much to create an XSLT just for these tables in the Appropriation Acts, from the XML provided from the API, to extract this data from all the Appropriation Acts, and publish that as Linked Data. There are many other examples of almost-structured data in legislation, waiting to be freed by developers, now that they have easy access to the underlying source.

We see this as a start. There is still much to do if we are to realise the potential of the statute book as public source of data. We are aiming to improve the modelling and the quantity of RDF data we make available about legislation, but it’s what others will do with the data that is really interesting. Now the UK has opened its statute book as Linked Data, we are keen to share our work with other governments, and to engage with academics in the legal informatics community and others with an interest in exploiting this rich source of information.

Legislative documents reside at various government Websites in various formats (TXT, HTML, XML, PDF, WordPerfect). URLs for these documents are often too long or difficult to construct. For example, here is the URL for the HTML format version of bill H.R. 3200 of the 111th U.S. Congress:

More importantly, “deep” links to internal locations (often called “subdivisions” or “segments”) within a legislative document (the citations within the law, such as section 246 of bill H.R. 3200) are often not supported, or are non-intuitive for users to create or use. For most legislative Websites, users must click through or fill out forms and then scroll or search for the specific location in the text of legislation. This makes it difficult if not impossible to create and share links to official citations. Enabling internal links to subdivisions of legislative documents is crucial, because in most situations, users of legal information need access only to a subdivision of a legal document, not to the entire document.

A Solution: LegisLink

LegisLink.org is a URL Redirection Service with the goal of enabling Internet access to legislative material using citation-based URLs rather than requiring users to repeatedly click and scroll through documents to arrive at a destination. Let’s say you’re reading an article at CNN.com and the article references section 246 in H.R. 3200. If you want to read the section, you can search for H.R. 3200 and more than likely you will find the bill and then scroll to find the desired section. On the other hand, you can use something like LegisLink by typing the correct URL. For example: http://legislink.org/us/hr-3200-ih-246.

Benefits

There are several advantages of having a Web service that resolves legislative and legal citations.

(1) LegisLink provideslinks to citations that are otherwise not easy for users to create. In order to create a hyperlink to a location in an HTML or XML file, the publisher must include unique anchor or id attributes within their files. Even if these attributes are included, they are often not exposed as links for Internet users to re-use. On the other hand, Web-based software can easily scan a file’s text to find a requested citation and then redirect the user to the requested location. For PDF files, it is possible to create hyperlinks to specific pages and locations when using the Acrobat plug-in from Adobe. In these cases, hyperlinks can direct the user to the document location at the official Website.

In cases where governments have not included ids in HTML, XML or TXT files, LegisLink can replicate a government document on the LegisLink site, insert an anchor, and then redirect the user to the requested location.

(2) LegisLink makes it easy to get to a specific location in a document, which saves time. Law students and presumably all law professionals are relying on online resources to a greater extent than ever before. In 2004, Stanford Law School published the results of their survey that found that 93% of first year law students used online resources for legal research at least 80% of the time.

(3) Creating and maintaining a .org site that acts as an umbrella for all jurisdictions makes it easier to locate documents and citations, especially when they have been issued by a jurisdiction with which one is unfamiliar. Legislation and other legal documents tend to reside at multiple Websites within a jurisdiction. For example, while U.S. federal legislation (i.e., bills and slip laws) is stored at thomas.loc.gov (HTML and XML) and gpo.gov (at FDsys and GPO Access) (TXT and PDF), the United States Code is available at uscode.house.gov and at gpo.gov (FDsys and GPO Access), while roll call votes are at clerk.house.gov and www.senate.gov. Governments tend to compartmentalize activities, and their Websites reflect much of that compartmentalization. LegisLink.org or something like it could, at a minimum, provide a resource that helps casual and new users find where official documents are stored at various locations or among various jurisdictions.

(4) LegisLinks won’t break over time. Governments sometimes change the URL locations for their documents. This often breaks previously relied-upon URLs (a result that is sometimes called “link rot”). A URL Redirection Service lessens these eventual annoyances to users because the syntax for the LegisLink-type service remains the same. To “fix” the broken links, the LegisLink software is simply updated to link to the government’s new URLs. This means that previously published LegisLinks won’t break over time.

(5) A LegisLink-type service does not require governments to expend resources. The goal of LegisLink is to point to government or government-designated resources. If those resources contain anchors or id attributes, they can be used to link to the official government site. If the documents are in PDF (non-scanned), they can also be used to link to the official government site. In other cases, the files can be replicated temporarily and slightly manipulated (e.g., the tag <a name=SEC-#> can be added at the appropriate location) in order to achieve the desired results.

Other technologies at the forefront of this space include recent efforts to create a URN-based syntax for legal documents (URN:LEX). To quote from the draft specification, “In an on-line environment with resources distributed among different Web publishers, uniform resource names allow simplified global interconnection of legal documents by means of automated hypertext linking.”

The syntax for URN:LEX is a bit lengthy, but because of its specificity, it needs to be included in any universal legal citation redirection service. The inclusion of URN:LEX syntax does not, however, mitigate the need for additional simpler syntaxes. This distinction is important for the users who just want to quickly access a particular legislative document, such as a bill that is mentioned in a news article. For example, if LegisLink were widely adopted, users would come to know that the URL http://legislink.org/us/hr-3200 will link to the current Congress’s H.R. 3200; the LegisLink URL is therefore readily usable by humans. And use of LegisLink for a particular piece of legislation is to some extent consistent with the use of URN:LEX for the same legislation: for example, a URN:LEX-based address such as http://legislink.org/urn:lex/us/federal:legislation:2009;
111.hr.3200@official;thomas.loc.gov:en$text-html could also lead to the current Congress’s H.R. 3200. A LegisLink-type service can include the URN:LEX syntax, but the URN:LEX syntax cannot subsume the simplified syntax being proposed for LegisLink.org.

The goals of Citability.org, another effort to address these issues, calls for the replication of all government documents for point-in-time access. In addition, Citability.org envisions including date and time information as part of the URL syntax in order to provide access to the citable content that was available at the specified date and time. LegisLink has more modest goals: it focuses on linking to currently provided government documents and locations within those documents. Since legislation is typically stored as separate, un-revisable documents for a given legislative term (lasting 2 years in many U.S. jurisdictions), the use of date and time information is redundant with legislative session information.

The primary goal of a legislative URL Redirection Service such as LegisLink.org is to expedite the delivery of needed information to the Internet user. In addition, the LegisLink tools used to link to legislative citations in one jurisdiction can be re-used for other jurisdictions; this reduces developers’ labor as more jurisdictions are added.

The challenges of a service like LegisLink.org are: (1) determining whether the legal community is interested in this sort of solution, (2) finding legislative experts to define the needed syntax and results for jurisdictions of interest, and (3) finding software developers interested in helping to work on the project.

This project cannot be accomplished by one or two people. Your help is needed, whether you are an interested user or a software developer. At this point, the code for LegisLink is written in Perl. Please join the LegisLink wiki site at http://legislink.wikispaces.org to add your ideas, to discuss related information, or just to stay informed about what’s going on with LegisLink.

At the same time the technical infrastructure for sharing information is getting better. Interested persons do not need any technical skills to instantly set up a vertical search engine with Google custom search. Open source tools are even covering high end demands of private online publishers. There is an open source tool or project that addresses the private publisher’s needs in any aspect, e.g. performance (CouchDB), machine learning (Mahout), or relevance ranking (Open Relevance Project). And in most cases it is not only a solution but a high end solution that can be adopted free of (licensing) cost.

Do legal online services exhibit these features only in Germany? The answer is No. These market trends are most likely valid throughout the world. I will come to the specifics of legal online services in Germany shortly.

First let me sum up what I consider to be the major driver in legal online services for the next couple of years. This is what I would like to label “Digital Convergence”–not the above-mentioned individual trends in the areas of content, technical infrastructure, and users/community, but a synergetic combination of these three trends that will drive the future of legal online services.

What are the characteristics of legal online services in Germany in 2010?

First, the fact that Germany is a code-based country makes legal online services in Germany an ideal target for any kind of invention in the area of text retrieval. For example, at the federal level there are more than 5,000 pieces of legislation with more than 100 provisions each. If you think of one specific term in paragraph 4 of § 97 GWB as a very precise reference to a specific legal issue, consider that

You thus get a sense of the challenge of legal online services in Germany. But you also get a sense of their potential. One could put it this way: The semantic web of legal content in Germany already exists; we “only” have to apply a common syntactical representation in order to create a very rich business resource by linking millions of individual and heterogeneous documents. The projects that share a common syntactical representation (e.g., jurMeta) will be rich sources for additional value-adding processes such as data mining.

Second, end-users of legal documents are by nature very conscious about retrieval quality. No matter whether they are aware of the parameters for retrieval quality such as scope, recall and precision, end users (e.g., lawyers) know that the one make-or-break case could exist; therefore the goal of any kind of information retrieval effort is to retrieve this one case but not others. To measure the relevance of retrieval results is very difficult, but determining relevance in law is far easier than in other domains. The importance of retrieval quality to end users of legal information systems is of course not specific to Germany, but is still an important driver for resource allocation in online retrieval projects. Therefore, legal research is the ideal test area for technical innovations in search and retrieval.Taking into account that lawyers are an attractive target group, investors will to a larger degree focus on legal research as a business opportunity. Such investment should speed progress.

Third, an important parameter for legal online services in Germany is the availability of primary legal content (legislation and case law). Public authorities in Germany claim copyright — at least to some extent — in official documents, and their efforts at publishing primary legal content online have been rudimentary. The existing offerings of legal content set up by state authorities are end-user oriented and very heterogeneous. The service providers — such as this firm — that technically publish the legal documents on behalf of the public authorities are private companies with business interests relating to legal information. Thus, allowing these companies to publish primary legal content on behalf of the public authorities is like letting the fox rule the henhouse. After all, official documents are the result of the tax-funded work of public authorities.

A modern publication infrastructure for primary legal content should functionally separate data collection from dissemination. Official documents should, if required, be anonymized, and stored on servers in a well-structured format for anybody to download either free-of-charge, or at cost of dissemination. This would allow non-commercial projects as well as commercial users to focus on value-adding processes, rather than crawling and re-engineering data that already exists as part of proprietary collections. In economic terms, this would lead to improved resource allocation, strengthen electronic media as tools for democratic processes, and support the goals of the Public Sector Information Directive.

Legal online research in Germany in 2020

In order to analyze the impact of metadata standards on legal publishers, I will be so bold as to predict how legal online services could look in 2020:

a) Public authorities will be obliged to publish any official document electronically in a well-structured format on servers accessible for anybody, for commercial or non-commercial use, at cost of dissemination.

b) There will be a wide range of legal online information services free of charge serving all sorts of information needs and target groups. These will range from easy-to-use systems for one-time users to expert systems for professionals.

c) The motivations for setting up legal online information services will vary to a larger extent than they do today. Successful online projects will have to support this growing range of motivations. (See Felix Zimmermann, JurMeta: A New Metadata Initiative for Legal Documents.) Since setting up legal online services will even be easier in 2020 than in 2010, more people will set up such services.

d) If one measures retrieval quality by recall and precision, I bet nearly all free services in 2020 will be better than the existing commercial legal online services in Germany in 2010. I invite anybody to come up with a proposal for a concrete experimental design with which to test this thesis, and I am curious to see the results of the experiment that proves this thesis wrong. But in any case:

e) The beneficiary of these trends will be the end user of legal information.

Impact on fee-based services and traditional publishing houses

Assuming that legal information services will radically improve in the future, is there a business opportunity for traditional publishing houses in legal online services at all? If the answer is yes, what will be the parameters for (business) success?

Applying a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis will identify the threats and opportunities for publishing houses. An important threat is the increasing speed of activity and change in the market. The technical lead-time of open-source-based start-ups might be too large for traditional publishers. An acquisition could help a traditional publisher catch up, but only if the acquirer is willing to adjust its processes and business principles. All traditional publishing houses I know claim to be customer oriented. I am convinced that market pressure (i.e., competition) will increase because of the numerous new legal online services being launched over the next couple of years. A substantial opportunity for traditional publishing houses lies in increasing the benefits that users derive from legal information, rather than trying to convert book selling to online media.

The biggest advantage of established legal publishing houses, as opposed to new start-ups, is their brand recognition, and the chance to position themselves as gatekeepers for high quality information. The corresponding threat is –- again –- based on new technologies: Services such as UserVoice allow new content providers to gain user feedback more effectively than through traditional market research, and at very low cost. Online social networks are analyzing the interactions among users, and are trying to exploit users’ behavior and ratings on the fly for business purposes. We will see whether traditional publishing houses will timely make use of such technologies, or whether such publishers will be able to catch up if they miss the chance to apply these new tools.

Conclusion

Assuming that, as mentioned above, a combination of trends will drive the future of legal online services, the publisher that identifies the synergies of the “digital convergence” and first applies them in customer products has the best chance to benefit from the current trends. Those that move too late might lose even more revenue than currently expected due to the change from print to online information.

So what about the impact of metadata standards such as jurMeta on legal online services in Germany? Metadata standards are an important component of the concept of the above-mentioned “digital convergence.” They are the syntactical bridge from the raw materials of German legal documents to the Semantic Web of legal information in Germany. Metadata standards for legal information services support decentralized value-adding processes, and thus are the key parameter for exploiting the synergies enabled by “digital convergence.” The metadata standards that best serve the various needs of the greatest number of legal online projects and services, will succeed.